A quick story about that summer job. At the time, Semiconductor Circuits was based in Haverhill, Mass. in an old brick building along the Merrimack River. (No air conditioning, by the way.) So, we had the windows open all day. The lab was on the second floor and one of the techs had his bench by the window that was directly above a dumpster. The company made potted "brick power supplies at the time. We would get some from production that the production techs were uable to repair. If we had one that was beyond repair, we'd literally throw it out the window to the dumpter below. In fact, we would routinely pitch dead supplies across the lab to him for dropping to the dumpster.

About 34 years ago, I was working at the US Army Yuma Proving Grounds and was getting EE Times(?). There was a letter to the editor from the wife of an engineer. Instead of the usual comments on how precise we tend to be and how we often use language to say exactly what we mean and interpret others spoken communication the same way and how that drives the wives crazy, this person talked about all those things in a positive light. She appreciated that when he said something, he would mean exactly that. She didn't mind that if she said "You Always Do X!" and he responded that on dates Y and Z, he didn't do X. It was a wonderful "article" and I had a copy of it for many years; sadly now lost.

If this sounds familiar and anyone has a copy of that or knows which issue it was in, I'd love to get a copy again.

There have been so many great reads in EETimes over the years and I owe much of my electronics industry education to the editors of this publication but three stories jumped out of my little grey cells ranging from dogged journalism, IP theft to murder!

Probably one of the biggest stories ever in EETimes was Alex Wolfe's coverage of the math error in the Intel Pentium processor; it went viral (even back then) and showed how important real journalism is. My second pick is the relentless coverage that EETimes undertook in the Avanti IP theft case. Diligent work by the editors showed that Cadence code had been lifted wholesale by Avanti. Finally and the most bizarre is the case of the hit man CEO. Amr Mohsen was CEO of Aptix and got entangled in a patent dispute with Quickturn but he then tried to have the judge in the trial murdered. http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285369

You really can't make this stuff up. Keep up the good work and as a post script I think Junko Yoshida's story in 2013 on the Toyota acceleration case is also going to be a classic.